Roma, Italia-visitors!

Oh my, quite a bit has happened since I’ve last written. Most importantly, I had visitors! Nana and Grandpa arrived on Sunday the 15th and left Wednesday the 26th. One of my best friends in the world, Andrew, also came Saturday the 22nd and left this morning. Andrew did the Rome program last year, so he had a ton of fun coming back to the city.
When Nana and Grandpa arrived, it was the weekend that the rest of my class had gone to Torino to see our work exhibited. I opted to stay behind to visit with them, and I’m glad I did because once classes started back up again, I barely had any time for visiting aside from lunch and dinner. Their first night in town, we went to a great restaurant near their apartment, which was right off of Piazza della Republica. We had a wonderful dinner, much of which included truffles. I spent the night at their apartment, which was an awesome place owned by a Yale alum. The whole place was packed full of great, funky art that looked like it had been collected from all over the world…just up Nana and Grandpa’s alley!
We spent our first day exploring. We happened upon an open air sculpture garden full of all sorts of statues and medallions. I soon realized that we were near Santa Maria della Vittoria, which houses Bernini’s famous St. Teresa in ecstasy sculpture. We popped in there for a bit to look around, then headed down towards Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (Saint Carlo at the four fountains, which are on each corner of the intersection). I’m doing a history project on this church and hadn’t been there yet, so I was quite excited to see it. It’s beautiful inside! Borromini’s uses of geometry are innovative and always surprising. So many different kinds of love. Next we headed back to my home, the Campo de’ Fiori. We had lunch at the café in the ground floor of my apartment building, Joe Rivetto’s (delicious white pizzas with mushrooms on one and zucchini on the other), then went to browse the market. We picked up supplies for dinner, dried fruit to snack on, and persimmons for the morning (I’d always thought they were funny looking tomatoes! Now I know…). The rest of the afternoon consisted of trying to figure out the bus system (I’m used to walking), exploring a tiny bit around the Pyramid, and them napping while I caught up on email. We cooked dinner at their apartment that night (veggies over fresh pasta with red wine and ricotta) and I once again spent the night there. We took a walk after dinner along Via Nazionale (their street, a major artery through the city) and did a bit of window shopping before heading to bed.
The next morning after breakfast, we headed out to the Capitoline museum at Michelangelo’s Campidoglio Piazza. The museum was great, but a bit long, so we didn’t get through all of it. I’m not crushed though, we saw some great stuff and I got my fair share of statues! We then went to a Tuscan restaurant in Piazza Pasquino and shared appetizers, the highlight of which was a simple salad of lettuce, thin avocado slices, and lemon juice. We then walked along the papal way for a while (lots of fun shops to browse), then cut through Piazza Navona to get gelato at Della Palma. I had fig, pine nut, and banana. Pine nut may be one of my new favorites! However, I have yet to order the same flavor twice from Della Palma :). The rest of their time here was more of them exploring on their own and meeting up with me for lunches and dinners. We found lots of great restaurants, though! Our favorite was Da Costanza, a homey place right around the corner from my apartment and situated under the ruins of the Pompeii Theater. They had killer Jewish artichokes (lightly fried) and a mushroom and truffle crepe in a cheese sauce that I went nuts for. We ended up eating there twice! Another place (Cul de Sac, again in Piazza Pasquino) specialized in meat and cheese platters and wine. The menu boasted 30+ cured and sliced meats, 40+ cheeses, and 1,400 different kinds of wine. No, that wasn’t a typo! The walls were lined with shelves and shelves of wine, and they had a special arm-and-claw contraption to retrieve them. We tried 4 different cheeses, all very different from one another, and all delicious.
Having Andrew here was a ton of fun as well. I hadn’t seen him since May! He was also good motivation to get out and do things in the city when some of my classmates would rather work or hang out in the apartment. One night we walked up the Geniculum hill in Trastevere and got a great view of the city. It was really fun to be high up in the city now that I know so many of the major landmarks. We had fun looking around and picking out major domes and important buildings. He’s always been good at memorizing names, dates, and the like, so he still knew more names than I did! The kid’s crazy. On our way down the hill, we stopped off at Bramante’s Tempietto, a tiny little structure that I had learned about in BTA. I hadn’t realized that it was here, though, so it was awesome to turn the corner and see it! Andrew and I had fun walking around, taking pictures, and even getting to go inside. We explored some of Trastevere on our way back, too.
The next day, we met up with Nana and Grandpa and went to St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican. I’d been once with my history class, but there had been a ceremony going on so much of the church had been roped off. The line to get in didn’t take too long, and we walked around inside for a while. I was excited to be able to reach the south transept, but the north one and the crossing, including the Baldacchino, were still roped off for mass. We were able to reach Bernini’s tomb for one of the popes, which was great to see up close. Andrew was of course spewing random history the whole way around, which was great. After Nana and Grandpa left, Andrew and I decided to climb up to the dome, since that was still on my to-do list. The line was practically non-existent, so we were climbing very soon and after many, many revolutions of stramps (our official word for stair-ramps), we reached the interior of the base of the dome’s drum. The mass was still going on below us, and right as we stepped into the dome, the entire interior was brilliantly illuminated! It was amazing. It really struck me from this height just how huge St. Peter’s is, too…the people below us looked like ants, and the inscriptions in mosaics right below us were much taller than I am…crazy! We were able to walk a quarter of the perimeter, then ascended many more stramps and stairs to reach the top of the dome at the base of the lantern. We got up there right as the sun was going down, so there was a beautiful pink light over the entire city, and the clouds in front of the sun were beautiful. We took the obligatory panoramic, myspace-style self portraits, and then stood just watching. There was also a debacle with my camera on self timer and a tripod, but we won’t go into that… From that high up, we got an amazing view of the starlings, which are these birds that come to Rome every few years by the thousands to roost. At 4:40 every evening, they all fly around and the patterns the form look parametrically modeled. We’ve always seen them from the ground, but it was spectacular to see them fill a space vertically…I had no idea how complex these patterns were! I took a video and will try to get that posted to youtube soon.
I also have now become thoroughly obsessed with Borromini’s Sant’ Ivo. Unfortunately, it’s only open 9-12, and some of that is taken up by a service, so it’s really difficult to visit. I’m now going every weekend though and sketching. I did one of the façade that is now my favorite thing in my book.
Also, yesterday was Thanksgiving! There ended up being 15 of us at dinner, including D.Bell and one girl’s boyfriend. There was virtually no planning about who had dibbs on what dish, who got to use the oven when, etc…but somehow we turned out a great meal! We had vegetable tempura, caramelized carrots, my spinach salad (with clementines, pomegranate seeds, cucumber, and feta with a homemade pomegranate vinaigrette…killer!), some soupy green bean and bacon thing D.Bell made, mashed potatoes, stuffing, chickens (doing a turkey wasn’t quite feasible with our lack of planning), pumpkin pie, apple pie, and ice cream. Everything was great! We timed things really well, too, and all the dishes were ready right around the same time. After dinner, many people went into non-tryptophan induced comas, but Andrew and I decided to walk around the town, since it was his last night. We wandered Trastevere (love that area) for a while, then made our way over to Piazza Navona, where they were starting to set up the annual Christmas market, which is a cross between cheap toys and a carnival. Also, during the day he and I wandered, since he had a few errands to run. He needed to get “life elixir” from the Quattro Fontane (filling a water bottle a quarter of the way from each) for his partner from last fall (he too studied San Carlo, though way more in depth than what I have the time for), and the main item we were in search of was a cheap mini statue of Julius Cesar, for a friend of his who’s also named Cesar. This was much harder than you’d think! They were more expensive than we’d expected, and some of them were not at all up to typical cheap tourist souvenir standards. We got into this crazy rhythm of going into EVERY souvenir shop we passed; something I never do. We started over by the Trevi Fountain and eventually found a good one over on Via Nazionale, going into almost every church we passed, too. It was a great afternoon for meandering.

Today has been pretty low-key. Andrew left this morning, and it’s been rainy off and on all day, so most of us have laid low. I did manage to get out at one point in a lull and explore (surprise, surprise) Trastevere. I’d never really wandered there during the day, so it was fun getting semi-lost and finding awesome little shops. The neatest one I found had old-fashioned looking globes, compasses, hourglasses, and cool solar calendars. They also had jewelry based on famous Roman sites: Pantheon plan cufflinks, Campidoglio floor pattern broaches, Spanish Steps pins….they were all so cool…too bad I don’t know more guys that wear cuff links! I did take lots of pictures of the store, though. I found a few more Christmas gifts for people, and also found a corner store with cheap ginger root (often it’s expensive) so we’re definitely going to make a big stir fry soon!
There’s an exhibit at the Museo del Corso of Rembrandts and Vermeers, so I’m going to try to do that this weekend, because how can I not? I still have to write about a day trip we did a few weekends ago to Hadrian’s Villa, but I’ve spent so long writing this afternoon that I’ll tackle that later…